Design is deep topic. One could say it’s the deepest. It’s about making decisions that affect choices in the world. When you design a chair, what you’ve really done is make a set of choices about how people using it will sit and what their experience will be. People sitting on chairs have choices too. They can defy your expectations by . . .

Discontinuous Transition in Process and Architecture

I’m going to the Agile 2015 conference this year. It’ll be the first time I’ve been to that conference in half a decade. Agile has been around for over 15 years now and at a certain point you feel like you’ve seen the important developments. In truth, I felt that way years ago but I kept going to agile conferences primarily to catch up with . . .

What do Ruby’s Enumerable module, .NET LINQ, and the new Java Stream package have in common? They are all there to facilitate functional programming. Here’s an example, pulled from Java 8’s docs because its support is the most recent.

If you read my last blog you know that I’ve been pushing the idea of chained computation rather far. It’s been fun to just try to use it for all of my utility programming to see where it breaks down. When you build a program as a single expression in a single sequential flow, one of the things that you have to deal with is making sure that . . .

When you find a more powerful tool, it’s hard to avoid using it. We like to think of this as the ‘if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ syndrome, but the fact of the matter is - I have plenty of tools. It’s just that some are more powerful and it's hard not to use them.

We’re really at a point in the industry where all developers should be aware of the importance of continuous refactoring. It’s easy to look at deteriorating code bases and get the sense that if only we’d done large refactorings along the way things would be better. But, code goes bad slowly and it happens through a predictable process. We add . . .

I’m constantly amazed at how biological code seems. It grows and it sprawls. It becomes easier to patch than change deeply. I have this theory that any system the where the cost of changing old structure is high has a strong biological feel. Code, in the worst cases, is like a decaying city. It's easy to add a new sign or a clean up a . . .